Place: Now on display - a new city you may never see

Published 4:00 am, Monday, September 24, 2007

An exhibition devoted to new San Francisco architecture zooms in where it counts - on the ground.

The show is "Street Cred San Francisco: Architecture and the Pedestrian Experience," and it opened amid the blizzard of design events choreographed this month by the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects. It's on display through Oct. 26 at 130 Sutter St. in the AIA offices, and it's worth a look.

The show's value isn't in the glossy march of big-name projects. It's in the emphasis on small-scale examples of design creativity, and how they can spark the neighborhood scenes that are San Francisco's allure.

One display shows details of the Linden Street nook of Blue Bottle Coffee near Octavia Boulevard, where Sagan Piechota Architecture turned the alleyway garage of a small building into the epicenter of caffeinated hipsterdom. Another contrasts the new Yerba Buena Lane between Mission and Market streets - a welcome but unremarkable path - with the more ambitious multilayered design first envisioned by landscape architect Cheryl Barton.

"Street Cred" also takes a few detours into the unexpected - such as a campaign, devised by the architectural provocateurs Rebar, to bring sidewalks to life: Crossing guards are costumed as Wonder Woman and Arnold Schwarzenegger, dances are choreographed in downtown intersections during the half-minute or so when you can cross with the light (too bad there's no video!).

In a more conventional vein, there are presentations of such forthcoming projects as the redevelopment of Trinity Plaza at Eighth and Market streets, plus an enormous wooden model of the ecologically driven plans for adding thousands of housing units near a ferry stop to Treasure Island. But even when the subject matter is familiar, the emphasis is fresh; the display of the San Francisco Federal Building depicts the plaza with its crushed-granite surface, not just the towering slab of concrete and steel.

The common thread of all the projects on display is their aim "to excite public imagination and renew a sense of civic life," according to the brochure by curators Darrin Alfred and Julie Kim.

For more information on the exhibition - and the final week's events in the Architecture and the City series - go to www.aiasf.org.

The Bay Area's big architectural story last week, of course, had more to do with skylines than streetscapes: the Transbay Joint Powers Authority's selection of a design-development team to craft plans for a new Transbay Terminal and, by the way, maybe place a 1,200-foot-tall tower into the air.

This doesn't come out of the blue: San Francisco planning initiatives in the 1980s steered the construction of towers south of Market Street, in an effort to create a new branch of the Financial District and take development pressure off neighborhoods such as Chinatown. The allowable height on Rincon Hill was lifted in 2005 after years of planning.

But when the One Rincon tower shot up near the Bay Bridge and the Transbay Tower images materialized, a topic once reserved for planning junkies entered the public realm. And as Mayor Gavin Newsom conceded Thursday, "not all the talk is favorable."

As Newsom stood next to the Transbay vision by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects and the development firm Hines, the self-described "native San Franciscan, fifth generation" said tall buildings are the way to go - as long as they go in the right direction.

"We're not talking about destroying our neighborhoods. We're not going west of Twin Peaks to erect commercial towers," Newsom said. "We're doing it right. We're doing it in the downtown core."

"Cities have a rhythm to them - things change," said Macris, who also was the head of planning back in the 1980s, when ballot battles over growth and height were election-day fixtures. "Our role is to manage change in the best possible way. ... This city is not just tourism, it's an international place to do business."

Newsom and Macris also stressed the symbolic link between the tower and the transit station to be built next door. Macris emphasized that further zoning changes will come only after full public review: "We are not driven simply by economics here ... whatever we recommend has to be driven by good urban planning."

Still, "I understand change is difficult," Newsom said. "This is a good debate for San Francisco - how we shape our future."

Judging by the back-and-forth sniping found on my Transbay stories via the new "comments" option at SFGate.com, I'd say the debate has already started.

Which brings us back to Architecture and the City.

At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the AIA office, a full procession of planners from various agencies will discuss the changes going on in the Transbay area. My suggestion: Get there early.

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